A cleric reads verses from the Koran to would-be suicide bombers at a detention center of the National Directorate of Security in Kabul. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security says it is trying to draw the poison out of the minds of detainees by teaching them the Koran, taking the men to mosques in Kabul to show people praying peacefully, and proving their instigators were wrong.
Photo: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
Read to Live, Live to Read
Suicide attacks, unknown in Afghanistan until 2004, have become particularly worrying as newly minted government forces take control of security ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops in 2014.
Other than roadside bombings, suicide attacks have come to account for the highest number of deaths of civilians and military forces.
Photo: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
Bouncing Back?
Four French soldiers in the eastern Kapisa province were killed June 9, 2012, by a male suicide bomber wearing a burqa. At least 20 civilians were killed in a June 6, 2012, attack by two suicide bombers on the Kandahar airport.
The search results for “recent Afghanistan suicide bombers” stretch back pages and pages.
More recently, on June 11, 2012, a roadside bomb planted by Taliban insurgents blew up an ambulance that was rushing a pregnant woman to a hospital to give birth. The woman, her baby and three relatives were all killed in the explosion.
None of the killers responsible for any of these attacks is likely to appear in Kabul’s suicide bomber rehab, and it is questionable if the rehabilitation center’s course of treatment would change their attitudes and beliefs.
Photo: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
Walking in Circles
“Over the last two years, the Taliban have moved away from large set-piece combat maneuvers and focused more on intimidation and social and political control,” Joshua Foust, an expert on Afghanistan and Central Asia at the Washington-based American Security Project, told Reuters, commenting on arson and poison attacks on schools in Takhar province.
According to Foust, circumstances become much more chaotic when responsibility for an area’s security is turned over to the Afghan army.
“Now that [Takhar]’s under Afghan control,” Foust said, “we’re seeing what I expect we’ll see in a lot of places: all the many armed groups vying for control.”
That vying is an explosive process.
Photo: Omar Sobhani/Reuters
Live Man Walking
Mahmmod Ulhaq, a detainee, walks inside a corridor at a detention center of the National Directorate of Security in Kabul. The National Directorate has yet to come up with a foolproof method of determining what is in the mind of a man who has previously committed to dying as a self-detonating weapon.
Even the professed sentiments of detainees offer only the most superficial assurance that killer attitudes can be reversed.
“I don’t want to go to paradise,” insisted one 17-year-old detainee who had been promised a direct ascent to heaven by his handlers, with no stop over at pain and suffering. “I want to go home.”
